“Pirate Google” sets sail to show copyright hypocrisy

The Pirate Bay defendants wanted to know why they were being prosecuted while …

The Pirate Bay trial saw the defendants trot out "the Google defense" on multiple occasions: Google indexes .torrent files, so what's wrong with our doing it? That point didn't sway the judge, who saw a world of difference between what the two sites did, but it did resonate with at least one Internet coder, who last week rolled out The Pirate Google.

The site serves as little more than a gateway to a Google custom search (it simply limits all queries to .torrent files, something that any searcher can do on their own by adding "filetype:torrent" to searches). It exists not so much to provide useful functionality, but to make the same point that The Pirate Bay admins made at their trial: Google indexes all of this stuff as well.

Ars spoke with the mysterious masked man (or woman) behind the site, who tells us that it was thrown together on Tuesday, April 21 and went live the following day. In the week since launch, the site has garnered both publicity and traffic—nearly a million hits so far.

Why launch the site at all? "The purpose of the site was simply to provoke discussion on issues such as piracy, net neutrality, and the power of the Internet as a disruptor of more traditional forms of media," we're told, though it's frankly refreshing to learn that the site's backer recognizes the complexity of the arguments at play here.

"Although the site has received a great deal of support, it has also spawned many detractors. I absolutely understand the argument that a comparison between The Pirate Bay and Google is much more nuanced then simply 'they both search copyrighted material,' and think this criticism is quite valid."

Indeed. Still, our intrepid Pirate Googler isn't really out to offer an answer but to promote debate and discussion. S/he also turns out to be something of an amateur philosopher, pointing out that "the Internet is a great equalizer, an individual such as myself is able to reach the world as effectively, and perhaps in an even more profound way than large corporations or politicians with deep pockets and connections in high places. The threat to the established media industry and others like it won't simply be mitigated by winning a few lawsuits or shutting down a few popular websites. These issues are fundamentally pervasive to our cultural development and as such their resolution can only be achieved by reconciling both the needs of industry and the public at large."

We're not sure that the public at large "needs" free access to prerelease Hollywood blockbusters, but the point about speech is well taken. How else could someone 20 years ago have injected themselves into debates on networking, copyright, the public domain, and search engine law... all within the space of a week, working from home, dropping only a ten-spot on a domain name?